Negotiating Space: The Evolution of the Egyptian Street, 2000–2011

167 Pages·2014·1.414 MB·English

by  Dimitris Soudias

CAIRO PAPERS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE
VOLUME 32 NUMBER 4 WINTER 2009
Negotiating Space
The Evolution of the Egyptian
Street, 2000–2011
Dimitris Soudias
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO PRESS
CAIRO NEW YORK
Cover photo: courtesy of Ben McTigue Conant
Copyright © 2014 by the American University in Cairo Press
113, Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
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Dar el Kutub No. 21911/13
ISBN 978 977 416 657 0
Printed in Egypt
Contents
Acknowledgments v
1 Introduction 1
Research Methods 3
2 The Political Process Approach and the Egyptian Case 10
Development of the Political Process Approach 11
Criticism of the Political Process Approach 13
The Political Process Approach in Egypt 15
Conceptualizing a Framework for the Political Process Approach 17
Perception, Normativity, and the Media in the Political Process
Approach 26
Construction of Protest Spaces for Representation 28
Place and Space 33
Power Relations 34
Power in Space 38
Space, Power Relations, and the Study of Protest in Egypt 39
Summary 44
3 Setting the Stage:
Authoritarian Structure and the Actors Involved 47
Hybrid Authoritarianism 47
Why Actors Matter 49
Resistance 51
Authority 61
Summary 65
iii
iv Contents
4 Taking to the Streets: Contentious Cycles in Egypt, 2000–2011 66
2000–2002: Reclaiming the Streets 68
2003: Protesting War, Outnumbering the Police 75
2004–2006: Enough! The Call for Democracy 78
2006–2010: Labor Strikes and the Art of Continuity 92
2010–2011: Thawra—The Streets Conquered 103
5 Conclusion 130
Conclusion 1 130
Conclusion 2 131
Conclusion 3 132
Conclusion 4 133
Conclusion 5 133
Outlook 133
Bibliography 137
About the Author 154
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank many people who made this study possible. I
would like to thank Dr. Christoph Schumann, Dr. Malak Rouchdy,
Dr. Rabab el-Mahdi, and Dr. Reem Saad for helping me frame and
organize my initial ideas and thoughts. I am very grateful for the time,
input, and encouragement of my accountabilibuddy, Kelsy Yeargain; my
editors, Ingmar Kreisl, Kristof Lowyck, and Moritz Ortegel; the many
interview respondents; and all of my friends and family for calming me
down in times of great distress. I would also like to thank Ruby Riad for
developing the figures used in this study, and Laila Abdelkhaliq Zamora
for interpreting and translating on many occasions. Finally I would like
to thank Iman Hamdy, without whom this publication would not have
been possible, and my copyeditor, who thoroughly read and questioned
each and every word of this book.
I dedicate this work to my parents, Zoi Theofanidu and Stathis Soudias,
and my sister, Maria-Christina Soudia.
v

CHAPTER 1
Introduction
On January 25, 2011, thousands of Egyptians took to the streets of
Cairo and other cities in the country to contest then-President Hosni
Mubarak’s authoritarian rule, and to express their grievances, frustra-
tions, and desires. Within less than three weeks, the popular uprising—
though facing massive police violence—forced Mubarak to leave office.
The sheer number and determination of large segments of Egypt’s
population changed long-established arrangements of power structures.
This process is ongoing.
When people took to the streets, national and international observ-
ers were taken by surprise. Intelligence services and so-called experts
were unable to predict the events that unfolded in front of their eyes.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton even described the
Mubarak regime as “stable” on January 25. In Germany, the failure of
political science to predict such events resonated in media discourse.
Crediting social media and the prior events in Tunisia with the pro-
tests in Egypt became a fashionable explanation in many academic and
media circles, effectively taking agency away from the Egyptian people.
Those factors certainly facilitated mass mobilization but cannot explain
the picture in its entirety: social media have been around in Egypt for
years, and saying Tunisia started a domino effect raises the question of
why it happened in Tunisia. So the question of “Why now?” remains;
what was different in January 2011 as opposed to before?
The fundamental answer is that revolutionary upsurges and other
such large-scale events in history are not predictable with any kind of
1
2 Negotiating Space: The Evolution of the Egyptian Street, 2000–2011
accuracy. In hindsight, however, as Timur Kuran rightly notes, such
revolutionary processes “are anything but surprising” (1989:41).
The objective of this study is a diachronic analysis of the develop-
ment of street protests in Egypt since 2000 that led to the downfall
of Mubarak in 2011. Under an authoritarian regime like Egypt’s, there
is no transparent, legitimate set of state institutions through which
the citizenry can express demands and grievances. When people are
deprived of the (electoral) power to change the status quo, however,
they “are likely to bring collective pressure to bear on authorities to
undertake change” (Bayat 2009:11). Thus they take their discontent to
public places in the form of strikes, protests, or sit-ins. After a period of
hibernation of social-movement activity during the 1990s, the Egyptian
street awakened in 2000 and progressed continuously, though not lin-
early, until 2011. I will analyze the negotiation of the status quo, that
is, the relationship between resistance (protesting actors) and authority
(the regime and the security forces that represent it) and their interac-
tions in protest events. Using the January 25 uprising as a dependent
variable, I will show how the ‘Egyptian street’ evolved, served as a space
of discontent, and hence was the main arena for negotiating power rela-
tions between resistance and authority that ultimately led to Mubarak’s
ousting. In short, I want to find out how the Egyptian street, which had
been proclaimed “apathetic” and “dead” (Bayat 2003) by observers for so
long, developed into a liberated protest space that forced an authoritar-
ian ruler out of office.
The January 25 uprising was the culminating episode of negotiating
power relations in a series of five consecutive contentious cycles since
2000. Based on premises of social-movement theory, constructivism,
and sociology of knowledge, I argue that the negotiation of power rela-
tions in Egypt has been expressed through the ‘battle’ over socially pro-
duced protest spaces. Authority, represented by security forces, attempts
to keep the streets ‘orderly’ and maintain territorial control. Protesters
attempt to gain this territorial control over streets and squares and try
to politicize them by constituting and expanding protest spaces that
symbolize resistance and discontent against existing authoritarian power
structures. In other words, authority tries to maintain the status quo
while resistance actors attempt to change it; the negotiation of protest
space is the negotiation of power relations. What makes space political,
Introduction 3
and thus social, is the active or participative use of public places, rather
than the ‘orderly’ passive use dictated by the regime (such as walking,
watching, driving). The toolkit through which spaces can be expanded
(as intended by protesters) and contracted (as attempted by security
forces) are tactical repertoires, that is, considerations and implementa-
tions of “contestation in which bodies, symbols, identities, practices, and
discourses are used to pursue or prevent changes” (Taylor and Van Dyke
2004:268) in the formation of space, and ultimately in institutionalized
power relations. The tactical choices actors make are highly influenced by
their (political) agenda, as well as by structural premises that have con-
straining effects. As I will show, each of the five protest cycles included
a predominant protesting actor that introduced particular tactics from
which other (involved) actors were able to learn. Along with this, tactical
choices are influenced through a process that I call ‘political learning’:
actors implement those available tactics that—through individual and
collective experiences and observation of other actors’ experiences—have
proven to be successful in order to pursue a goal.
While many studies on social-movement actors in Egypt have
been undertaken (Wickham 2002; Abdelrahman 2009; el-Mahdi
2009a; Beinin 2009b), few have considered spatial categories (Ismail
2006; Bayat 2009) and did so only episodically. Only recently, ‘space’
in police–protester interactions has started becoming a constant in
some case study research on social movements (Zajko and Béland 2008;
Wahlström 2010; Martin 2011), but a theoretical approach is still miss-
ing. This research intends to contribute to closing this research gap.
Research Methods
It took a long time to find the set of research methods most suitable for
my investigation. Approaching the topic of street protests in Egypt in
research conducted in 2010, I explored how tactical repertoires had influ-
enced the evolution of these protests since 2000 and concluded with a
counterfactual analysis—that is, “the exploration of things that did not
happen, but (conceivably) could have” (Gerring 2001:221)—regarding
the potential risks for the authorities if Midan al-Tahrir in the heart
of Cairo were to be occupied by protesters for a longer period of time.
The mass protests beginning in January 2011 have answered some of the
questions I posed, and I found that I had to reframe parts of my research.
4 Negotiating Space: The Evolution of the Egyptian Street, 2000–2011
I now want to find out what led to the 2011 mass protests. As men-
tioned above, I argue that the main locus of negotiating power rela-
tions in Egypt is the politicized street, and that ultimately episodes (or
cycles) of street protests (which depend heavily on structural conditions
in terms of the political process approach—PPA) led to the culminating
episode of protest activity in January and February 2011. The negotiation
of power relations is expressed in the battle of authority and resistance
over protest spaces, which is fought through tactical repertoires. Since
the starting point of my research is 2000, diachronic research seems
the most suitable design: I will look carefully at changes in Egyptian
society during and prior to the 2011 uprising and the acquisition and use
of tactical repertoires of authority and resistance. I decided to focus on
the Cairo metropolitan region, because most street protest events occur
there, as it is the capital and the country’s political center, the “seat of
concentrated wealth, power, people, and needs” (Bayat 2009:165) and
the site of aggregated contradictions and social conflicts. Indeed, the
inequalities of Cairo embody the prevailing social, political, and eco-
nomic order of the state as a whole. Arguably, Egypt-wide conclusions
about the efficiency of tactics can be deduced from the Cairo situation
if a prevailing pattern of tactical repertoires can be found.
I use a triangulation of methods to check my results in multiple ways.
These methods are: (1) qualitative, semi-structured interviews with activ-
ists, politicians, scholars, and journalists (Davies 2001; Goldstein 2002;
Landman 2008; Tansey 2009); (2) documentary research (Mogalakwe
2006; Scott 2006) of collective action events; and (3) participant obser-
vation in protest events. Together, these methods will explain who
fights the battle over protest spaces with which set of tactical tools and
for what reason, which in turn will help to explain how and why the
2011 uprising occurred.
The interviews were conducted in English and recorded with a tape
recorder, and the relevant sections were transcribed. During protests I
would ask questions in Arabic to random participants and take writ-
ten notes. Personal contacts greatly facilitated my entry into the field
and further respondents were accessed through snowball interviews.
Protest observations were photographed or recorded with the video
camera of my phone; slogans and chants were recorded with a tape
recorder, as well as in field notes that were typed out when needed. It